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Haze: Essays, Poems, Prose

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Every once in a while you run across something that takes you where you are going. So it is with Mark Wallace's essay in his book Haze, "On the Lyric as Experimental Possibility." It's the poetry of politics and the politics of poetry, and how they can come to be in bringing us access to our own complexities as culture, and the material world, shape them. True to his own essay, Wallace's poetry moves beyond the too-absorbed "I" of many a contemporary lyric, or its totalizing tendencies, to a particularity in the "material, interpersonal, political" and detailed site of a poem. Following Adorno, he sees the possibility of lyric that shows its own "partiality, lack of transcendence, and situational, contingent, existence."
Others essays, however, are more imposing-- or should I say, impositional?-- arraying us with a kind of arrogance that I at any rate find unappealing. And the poetry survives its saying, but sometimes only barely. The lead poem "The Lawless Man," for example, works for the kind of poetry Wallace writes. How far it goes beyond that fulfillment I will leave to others to explore.
All in all, this Wallace is good example of the mixed genre book-- poetry, essay, prose poem, and hybrids-- almost always reaching where he would go, and sometimes enlightening me in my complexities.